I am extremely excited about Viltrox’s move towards premium lenses, like their upcoming LAB series and existing PRO lineup, but Viltrox is too clever a company to get locked into just one end of the market. Perhaps equally important to their development of higher end lenses is their development plans on the other end of the spectrum, where they are leveraging their growing optical expertise into high performing budget lenses. Ironically Viltrox has, from the beginning, built fairly premium feeling lenses. They have always been made primarily from metal, which feel nice but adds a bit of weight. So for Viltrox the transition to using plastic as the material for these new series of lenses was an intentional one.

The series began with the very useful AF 20mm F2.8 full frame lens (which I reviewed here), an extremely light, extremely inexpensive, but surprisingly strong optical instrument. They have announced a similar 40mm F2.5 STM full frame lens that is yet to come, but in the meantime their next lens in this series is the Viltrox AF 56mm F1.7 STM lens being released for Fujifilm X-mount. Fuji’s new XF 56mm F1.2 WR is a gorgeous lens, but it retails for a $1000 USD. This Viltrox lens will retail for under $140 USD (buy from Viltrox and use the code DUSTINABBOTT to get 8% more off!), meaning that you could buy nearly 7 of these lenses for the price of the Fuji. That makes it an attractive option for those who want this focal length but have a tight budget. Is it worth checking out? Find out my thoughts by watching the video review below or by reading my text review here.

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Thanks to Viltrox for sending me a review loaner of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review. *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done with the Sony a7RV along with the Sony Alpha 1 that serve as my benchmark cameras for Sony lenses along with the Sony a7C2 that I happened to be reviewing at the same time.

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Viltrox already has an existing autofocusing 56mm F1.4 APS-C lens (my review here) that they released in 2020, but that lens is heavier (290g) and more expensive ($299 USD) relative to this new lens. The Viltrox AF 56mm F1.7 has a slightly slower aperture (one half stop), lacks an aperture ring, but compensates in part by being extremely sharp. In fact, if you look at this chart I’ve made comparing the MTF from the two lenses, you can see that I’ve put a line through the 80% level. None of the performance of the older lens (at least at 30LPmm) reaches that threshold, while there is only the tiniest part of the image of the new lens that fall below that.

There is 15% more image sharpness in the center of the frame and and more than 20% more in the midframe. The corners are more like 40% sharper! This is going to be a very sweet bargain portrait lens. 56mm on Fuji’s 1.5x crop APS-C sensor translates to 84mm, a prime portrait focal length.

This tells us all we need to know about who this new lens is for: much like Samyang’s “Tiny series”, this lens is for those who don’t care about bells and whistles and just want a lightweight, high performing lens. And this lens is incredibly compact – look how compact it is when compared to the Fuji XF 56mm F1.2 WR and the yet-to-be-released TTArtisan AF 56mm F1.8 (another impressive little lens!)

The Viltrox is going to need all of that sharpness for this test, as they are first releasing this lens on Fuji X-mount, which means that I’ll be reviewing it on the most demanding platform I currently test, Fuji’s 40MP X-Trans APS-C sensor in the Fujifilm X-H2. Is this the rare budget lens that can handle this sensor? We’ll find out together.

Photos of the Viltrox AF 56mm F1.7

Photos taken with the Viltrox AF 56mm F1.7

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GEAR USED:

Purchase the Viltrox AF 56mm F1.7 @ Viltrox (use code DUSTINABBOTT for 8% off starting April 23rd) | B&H Photo | Adorama | Nuzira | Amazon | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

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